The Mushroom Gatherer
In Viktorie Hanišová’s lyrical novel The Mushroom Gatherer, a woman uncovers painful childhood memories that lie in wait beneath the surface of her quiet life.
In the seven years since she ran away from home and never looked back, Sisi has spent her summers following the same route through the dense Bohemian Forest, collecting wild mushrooms and selling them to a village restaurant for the meager sum off of which she survives the harsh Czech winters. When she is forced to return to her childhood home after her mother’s death, long-suppressed memories of her childhood begin to resurface. She wades through them to make sense of her life and connections to the environment and people that surround her.
This atmospheric novel moves back and forth between Sisi’s present and her early experiences as the only daughter of a well-respected Czech family. In the present, she lives in near-total isolation, plagued by insomnia and bouts of intense disorientation. As memories of her childhood resurface, it becomes clear that she is caught in the shadows of her adolescent traumas.
The novel moves between its time periods in a seamless manner, resulting in a layered, nuanced meditation on grief, invisible violence, and the aftermath of abuse. Delicate and honest, its power rests in its slow pace and sensitivity to the intricate processes of memory and perception. Vibrant details make meaning of setting and environment, and Sisi’s mushrooms serve as both a reminder of the intimacy between the human and nonhuman worlds and a compelling metaphor for the structure of traumatic memory and creative possibilities for connection and survival.
Bold, candid, and haunting, The Mushroom Gatherer is an affecting novel about how the past shapes the present in intricate and unexpected ways.
Reviewed by
Bella Moses
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